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Trump Complains about Republican Efforts to Thwart His Presidential Nomination

Last Updated: June 19, 2016 3:23 PM

Ken Bredemeier

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, left, shouts to Secret Service agents that supporter Diana Brest, right, had been waiting in line since 2 a.m. to see the candidate speak at a rally, June 18, 2016, in Phoenix.

Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican U.S. presidential nominee, is complaining that some Republicans are trying to thwart the official declaration of his nomination at next month's national party nomination convention.

Some delegates to the convention in (the midwestern city of) Cleveland, Ohio, say they want to change the party's rules to allow delegates to vote for someone other than the brash billionaire real estate mogul, who surged past 16 other Republican candidates in months of state-by-state party nominating contests to give him a majority of pledged delegates at the convention.

But Trump's opponents say the one-time television reality show host does not represent the Republicans' traditional conservative policy positions and that his intemperate comments about women, Muslims and Mexicans make him unacceptable as the Republican standard bearer.

On Sunday, he voiced new support for an idea he has offered before, saying it was "common sense," as a way to halt a possible terrorist attack, to profile Muslims already in the United States, not just temporarily block them from entering the country, as he also favors.

"I think profiling is something that we're going to have to start thinking about as a country," he told CBS' Face the Nation news show. "And other countries do it; you look at Israel and you look at others and they do it and they do it successfully. You know, I hate the concept of profiling. But we have to start using common sense, and we have to use, you know, we have to use our heads ... we really have to look at profiling. We have to look at it seriously."

Trump's Republican detractors point to recent national polls showing that big majorities of voters view him unfavorably and that the likely Democratic nominee, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is pulling further ahead of him five months before the November 8 election.

FILE - Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks at a rally at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Circuit Center, in Pittsburgh, June 14, 2016.

On Saturday, Trump characterized former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, one of his former presidential challengers, and a second one-time rival he did not name as "a couple of guys that were badly defeated and they're trying to organize maybe like a little bit of a delegate revolt." Neither Bush nor Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Trump's closest rival before ending his presidential run in early May, has endorsed Trump, but he offered no evidence that Bush and Cruz were leading a convention delegate revolt.

"Who are they going to pick?" Trump asked supporters at a campaign rally in Nevada about an alternative to his candidacy. "I beat everybody. But I don't mean beat -- I beat the hell out of them."

Trump, running for elected office for the first time, told CBS, "It would be helpful if the Republicans could help us a little."

Trump said Republican lawmakers in Congress who have expressed doubts or outright opposition to his candidacy "should do their jobs ... and let me run for president."

Numerous Republican officials have voiced tepid support for his candidacy or rejected it outright, including the party's 2012 presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, who has been outspoken in his opposition to Trump's nomination.

Trump said that if Republicans don't unite to support his candidacy he would stop fundraising on behalf of his campaign and the national party. Instead, Trump said, he would resume self-funding much of his campaign as he did during the party nomination fight.

Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, celebrated the arrival Saturday of their second grandchild as their daughter Chelsea gave birth to a boy, Aidan Clinton Mezvinsky. The happy grandparents said they were "all over the moon" and "grateful for our many blessings."